The New Stack Podcast

ByConity is an open source project that emerged from ByteDance's use of Clickhouse, an open-source database system, to address their growing data volume. ByConity focuses on enhancing the separation of compute and storage, improving multitenancy support, and optimizing query performance in cloud-native environments.

ByteDance's Vini Jaiswal, a principle developer advocate at the parent company of TikTok, highlights the power of open source in fostering innovation and collaboration. She shares her personal experience of leveraging open source to solve problems quickly and efficiently. She emphasizes the importance of getting involved in open source, even for those who might be hesitant, and suggests starting by identifying a pain point and making small contributions.

ByConity's architecture, which separates compute and storage, offers benefits like preventing data lake corruption, read and write separation, elasticity, and scalability. Jaiswal also mentions her previous experience with open source during her time at CitiBank, where she realized how open source accelerated digital transformations.

Throughout the conversation, Jaiswal underscores the strength of open source communities in collectively addressing challenges. She encourages listeners to embrace open source and start contributing, emphasizing how even small contributions can lead to significant impacts over time.

The episode also delves into Jaiswal's involvement with other open source projects, such as PyTorch, and explores the intersection of open source and generative AI.

Learn more from The New Stack about open source and cloud native environments:

What Is 'Cloud Native' (and Why Does It Matter)?

Cloud Native Ecosystem News and Resources

How to Build an Open Source Community

Along with discussing the emergence and ascension of platform engineering in this episode, we also discuss the role that Humanitec plays in helping organizations establish platforms for developers, as well as Backstage, a popular open source internal developer platform that was developed by Spotify for its own developers.

An IDP, our guest Kaspar Von Grünberg explained, is a standardized interface for developers to build applications using a  golden path of vetted tools and libraries, allowing for a high degree of efficiency for both the developers themselves as well as the engineers who are supporting the developers. They can include an integration and delivery plane, a continuous integration registry, a platform orchestrator, observability tools and a resource plane.

"How you're consuming this is a little bit up to the individual preference of the user, and what the platform team has configured for you. So we're seeing some teams like to use a user interface and some teams like to use code based interactions," Von Grünberg explained.

In some ways, a IDP is reminiscent of the platform-as-a-service packages of a decade ago. They also were designed to help developer efficiency, though devs chafed at the limited number of tools they were allowed to use  in these walled gardens. That was a mistake, Von Grünberg said.

Those platforms required developers to use a small set of pre-defined times.

"We don't want to get back to those times, which is why we want to provide sensible defaults," Von Grünberg said. A good IDP will provide developers with "golden paths" or "paved roads" as Netflix calls them.

"Developers can stay on those paths if they want," Von Grünberg said. They can enjoy the security default and service-level agreements (SLAs) from the engineers. But developers are also free to leave the path and make low-level configurations on their own as well.

"Good platform engineering is never about covering all the use cases," he said.

Learn more from The New Stack about platform engineering and Humanitec:

Platform Engineering Overview, News, and Trends

How to Pave Golden Paths That Actually Go Somewhere

Build Your IDP at Light Speed with a Platform Reference Architecture

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, technologist and author John Willis emphasized caution when considering AI solutions from vendors. He advised against blindly following vendor recommendations for "one-size-fits-all" AI products, likening it to discouraging learning Java in the past in favor of purchasing a product.

Willis stressed that DevOps serves as an example of how human expertise, not just products, solves problems. He urged C-level executives to first understand AI's intricacies and then make informed purchasing decisions, suggesting a "DevOps redo" to encourage experimentation and collaboration, similar to the early days of the DevOps movement.

Willis highlighted that early adopters of DevOps, like successful banks, heavily invested in developing their human capital. He cautioned against hasty product purchases, as the AI landscape is rife with startups that may quickly disappear or be acquired by larger companies.

Instead, Willis advocated for educating teams on effective data management techniques, including retrieval augmentation, to fine-tune large language models. He emphasized the need for data cleansing to build robust data pipelines and prevent LLMs from generating undesirable code or sensitive information.

According to Willis, the process becomes enjoyable when done correctly, especially for companies using LLMs at scale with retrieval augmentation. To ensure success, he suggested adding governance and structure, including content moderation and red-teaming of data, which vendors may not prioritize in their offerings.

Learn more from The New Stack about DevOps and AI:

AIOps: Is DevOps Ready for an Infusion of Artificial Intelligence?

How to Build a DevOps Engineer in Just 6 Months

Power up Your DevOps Workflow with AI and ChatGPT

Deliveroo, a prominent food delivery company, relies on Apache Flink, a distributed processing engine, to enhance its three-sided marketplace, connecting delivery drivers, restaurants, and customers. Seeking to improve real-time data streaming and gain insights into customer behavior, Deliveroo transitioned to Flink, comparing it to alternatives like Apache Spark and Kafka Streams. Flink, with feature parity to their previous platform, offered stability and scalability. They initially experimented with Flink on Kubernetes but turned to the Amazon Managed Service for Flink (MSF) for enhanced support and maintenance.

Engineers from Deliveroo, Felix Angell and Duc Anh Khu, emphasized the need for flexibility in data modeling to accommodate their fast-paced product development. However, flexibility can be complex, often requiring data model adjustments. They expressed the desire for a self-serve configuration feature in MSF, allowing easy customization of low-level settings and auto-scaling based on application metrics. This move to Flink and MSF has empowered Deliveroo to focus on core responsibilities like continuous integration and delivery while efficiently managing their data processing needs.

Learn more from The New Stack about Apache Flink and AWS:

Kinesis, Kafka and Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink

Apache Flink for Real Time Data Analysis

Apache Flink for Unbounded Data Streams

Over the past five to ten years, the testing of microservices has seen significant growth. This surge in testing can be attributed to the increasing adoption of microservices and Kubernetes, which signify a shift away from monolithic application architectures. Bruno Lopes, a leader at Kubernetes company incubator Kubeshop, noted this trend. Kubeshop has initiated six Kubernetes projects, including TestKube, a Kubernetes native testing framework led by Lopes.

This rise in testing is making it more accessible to a wider audience and is enhancing the developer experience through automation. Developers now have more time to focus on innovation rather than manual testing. However, there is often a disconnect between development and testing, as developers move quickly, outpacing organizational adaptation to modern testing methods.

Lopes emphasized the importance of testing before production deployment and advocated for creating production-resembling testing environments that allow for rapid deployment without waiting for manual tests. This approach is particularly critical for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams who need to respond quickly to issues and minimize downtime for customers. In some cases, it's necessary to run tests within Kubernetes itself, a concept that may take time for companies to fully embrace as the developer experience continues to improve.

Learn more from The New Stack about Kubernetes, Testing and TestKube:

Testkube: A Cloud Native Testing Framework for Kubernetes

Top 5 Challenges in Modern Kubernetes Testing

Why You Should Start Testing in the Cloud Native Way

Apache Flink is an open-source framework and distributed processing engine designed for data analytics. It excels at handling tasks such as data joins, aggregations, and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) operations. Moreover, it supports advanced real-time techniques like complex event processing.

In this episode, Deepthi Mohan and Nagesh Honnalii from AWS discussed Apache Flink and the Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink (MSF) with our host, Alex Williams. MSF is a service that caters to customers with varying infrastructure preferences. Some prefer complete control, while others want AWS to handle all infrastructure-related aspects.

Use cases for MSF can be grouped into three categories. First, there's streaming ETL, which involves tasks like log aggregation for later auditing. Second, it supports real-time analytics, enabling customers to create dashboards for tasks like fraud detection. Third, it handles complex event processing, where data from multiple sources is joined and aggregated to extract meaningful insights.

The origins of MSF trace back to the evolution of real-time data services within AWS. In 2013, AWS introduced Amazon Kinesis, while the open-source community developed Apache Kafka. These services paved the way for MSF by highlighting the need for real-time data processing.

To provide more flexibility, AWS launched Kinesis Data Analytics in 2016, allowing customers to write code in JVM-based languages like Java and Scala. In 2018, AWS decided to incorporate Apache Flink into its Kinesis Data Analytics offering, leading to the birth of MSF.

Today, thousands of customers use MSF, and AWS continues to enhance its offerings in the real-time data processing space, including the launch of Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka). To align with its foundation on Flink, AWS rebranded Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink to Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, making it clearer for customers.

Learn more from The New Stack about AWS and Apache Flink:

Apache Flink for Real Time Data Analysis

Apache Flink for Unbounded Data Streams

3 Reasons Why You Need Apache Flink for Stream Processing

Modern developer conferences like the upcoming Infobip Shift Conference in Croatia are centered around themes. At this particular event for developers, you can expect a lot of focus to be on the developer experience and artificial intelligence (AI).

Ivan Burazin, Chief Development Experience Officer at InfoBip, joined us on the show and emphasizes that developers spend a substantial portion of their time not coding, often losing 50 to 70% of their productive hours to non-coding activities, such as setting up environments, running tests, and building code. This highlights the importance of improving the developer experience to enhance productivity.

The developer experience has both internal and external dimensions. Externally, it impacts customer experience, while internally, it influences development velocity. A better developer experience translates to faster and more efficient coding.

The Shift Conference will feature talks on six stages, one of which will focus on the developer experience, addressing its internal and external aspects. Additionally, AI will take center stage at another segment of the conference.

Although there may not be an abundance of true AI experts taking the stage, the focus will be on how individuals and companies can leverage AI to create products and services. It's recognized that AI will play a pivotal role in the future of every industry, and the conference aims to explore practical applications and strategies for integrating AI into various businesses.

Overall, the Shift Conference aims to address the challenges developers face in optimizing their productivity and explore the growing importance of AI in shaping the future of businesses and products.

Learn more from The New Stack about the developer experience and InfoBip Shift:

7 Principles and 10 Tactics to Make You a 10x Developer

The Challenges of Marketing Software Tools to Developers

A Guide to Better Developer Experience

This episode delves into Apache Flink, a versatile platform for executing both batch and real-time streaming data analysis tasks. This session marks the beginning of a three-part series unveiling Amazon Web Services' (AWS) new managed service built on Flink. Future episodes will explore this service in detail and examine customer experiences.

The podcast features insights from Danny Cranmer, a principal engineer at AWS and an Apache Flink PMC and Committer, along with Hong Teoh, a software development engineer at AWS.

Flink stands out as a high-level framework for defining data analytics jobs, accommodating both batch and streaming data sets. It offers APIs for building analysis jobs in various languages, including Java, Python, and SQL. Flink also provides a distributed job execution engine with fault tolerance and horizontal scaling capabilities.

One prominent use case is Extract-Transform-Load (ETL), where raw data is swiftly processed for specific workloads. Flink excels in delivering low-latency transformations for unbounded data streams. Additionally, Flink supports event-driven applications, responding immediately to triggers such as user requests for weather data.

Flink ensures exactly-once processing, critical for scenarios like financial transactions. It employs checkpoints to maintain data integrity in case of node failures.

The podcast also touches on AWS's role in supporting the open-source Flink project and the future outlook for this powerful data processing framework.

Learn more from The New Stack about Apache Flink:

3 Reasons Why You Need Apache Flink for Stream Processing

Apache Flink for Unbounded Data Streams

8 Real-Time Data Best Practices

In an interview with The New Stack, renowned technologist Adrian Cockcroft discussed the process of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) through prompt engineering. Cockcroft, known for his roles at Netflix and Amazon Web Services, explained how to obtain tailored programming advice from an LLM. By crafting specific prompts like asking the model to provide code in the style of a certain expert programmer, such as Java's James Gosling, users can guide the AI's output.

Prompt engineering involves setting up conversations to bias the AI's responses. These prompts are becoming more advanced with plugins and loaded information that shape the model's behavior before use. Cockcroft highlighted the concept of fine-tuning, where models are adapted beyond what a prompt can contain. Companies are incorporating vast amounts of their internal data, like wiki pages and corporate documents, to train the model to understand their specific domain and processes.

Cockcroft pointed out the efficacy of ChatGPT within certain tasks, illustrated by his experience using it for data analysis and programming assistance. He also discussed the growing need for improved results from LLMs, which has led to the demand for vector databases. These databases store word meanings as vectors with associated weights, enabling fuzzy matching for enhanced information retrieval from LLMs. In essence, Cockcroft emphasized the multifaceted process of shaping and optimizing LLMs through prompt engineering and fine-tuning, reflecting the evolving landscape of AI-human interactions.

Learn more from The New Stack about LLMs and Prompt Engineering:

Top 5 Large Language Models and How to Use Them Effectively

The Pros (And Con) of Customizing Large Language Models

Prompt Engineering: Get LLMs to Generate the Content You Want

Developer Tips in AI Prompt Engineering

TechWorld with Nana is one of the most popular resources for people looking to get into or progress a DevOps career. Nana Janashia, the creator of TechWorld with Nana, is a DevOps trainer and consultant who joined us to discuss why DevOps is needed now more than ever and how this is the perfect time to begin a career in DevOps.

Host Alex Williams and Nana go over the key concepts of DevOps. Then they talk about how the complexity of tools can sidetrack and complicate the learning process for those new to DevOps and why focusing on concepts rather than tools the way to go. Before wrapping up the conversation, they even talk about the best ways for people to get involved who are new to DevOps.

Nana's journey into DevOps commenced during her time as an engineer in Austria, where she began exploring Kubernetes. As inquiries from colleagues poured in, she recognized her knack for demystifying complex topics, catalyzing her passion for teaching. Viewers attest to switching to DevOps careers after watching her videos.

Throughout the conversation, we learned how people can discover the world of DevOps through TechWorld with Nana as an expert guide. With a large YouTube audience, online courses, workshops, and corporate training, Nana has empowered countless individuals in advancing their DevOps expertise. The six-month boot camps from TechWorld with Nana encompass a comprehensive curriculum, starting with fundamentals and culminating in hands-on programming abilities, Python automation, configuration management, and Prometheus-based monitoring.

Nana underscores that DevOps, still a relatively nascent profession, suffers from role ambiguity both among engineers and within companies aspiring to implement it. This confusion stems from differing workflows and environments when engineers switch jobs. Nana's insights bring clarity to these challenges, acknowledging the evolving chaos of the DevOps culture and its driving force for innovation in managing intricate distributed technologies.

Learn more about DevOps from TNS, Roadmap (our sister site), and TechWorld with Nana:

TechWorld with Nana - DevOps  Bootcamp

TechWorld with Nana - DevSecOps Bootcamp

DevOps Learning Roadmap

DevOps News, Trends, and Analysis